OIP-118: The Olympus 2022 Strategy

(Compiled by the Strategy task force, based on Community feedback since inception)

This proposal builds on and synthesizes previous community efforts on strategy, including early discussions and collaboration held in discord by the community, the Olympus12 plan, comments from community calls and the RFC forum post. The strategy is meant to focus efforts and resources to help optimize growth in the short to mid term.

The vision and fundamental principles described in a parallel post are meant to be stable and change infrequently. The strategy in this proposal is constantly reevaluated and should be reviewed at least every six months, as the nature of strategy work and opportunities means that strategy should be adaptive.

What is strategy?

“Good strategy almost always looks simple and obvious in retrospect… It identifies the one or two critical issues in a situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focused and concentrated action and resources on them” - Richard Rumelt

The core idea of strategic work is to enable strong focus on key issues. At Olympus it should lead to measurable outcomes. Olympus is a mission-driven project, which means strategy is built around short-term actions that are highly impactful on the long-term mission.

The structure of the strategy proposed is Diagnose -> Guiding Policy -> Coherent Action. This means it starts with identifying key challenges or problems, then defining a high level guiding policy and finally specifying a number of identified actions that will address the key challenges.

Why strategy at Olympus?

Olympus and OlympusDAO have evolved much over the last 18 months. As the initial launch and expansion phase is over, there is a need to align effort and work towards a few set goals. Not everything can be done at the same time.

The nature of the DAO is that all contributors, and the community at large, are spread around the globe. Everyone should be able to get daily guidance on priorities from the strategy, without need for lengthy alignment discussions.

Additionally, the DAO has identified a set of OKRs, and the strategy should align with the OKRs in order to measure outcomes at the end of the year.

The Olympus 2022 Strategy

Diagnosis

Olympus aims to establish OHM as the decentralized, programmatic reserve currency at the center of digital economies.

A reserve currency can be defined by ref

• Depth and liquidity to allow for reliable and efficient transactions
• Permissionless and easy exchanged for other currencies
• Being held by many monetary authorities and institutions, in significant amounts
• Maintaining stability with low volatility towards other currencies, assets and goods
• Establishes markets for financing via credit and debt instruments

Two key unaddressed challenges for Olympus to grow as a reserve currency are:

1. significant adoption by other protocols, DAOs, and DeFi institutions (demonstrating utility to the DeFi ecosystem at the same time) and
2. demonstrating increasing relative stability over time.

Guiding Policy

Olympus will focus on addressing the two key challenges identified above, both of which are largely under Olympus’ control: drive adoption with DeFi DAOs and protocols, and demonstrate increasing stability over time.

Adoption and utility: Build OHM reserve currency status by focusing on uptake as a reserve with DeFi protocols and DAOs. Encourage adoption by providing direct benefits for protocols and DAOs that onboard OHM as a long term treasury asset and liquidity pair.

Stability: Increase stability and lower volatility over time by implementing Range Bound market operations and a clear Treasury management process. Reduce required trust by implementing a transparent, codified monetary policy and governance system.

Coherent Actions

Adoption (via utility)

Provide a clear value proposition to DeFi protocols and DAOs

1. Increase OHM adoption by focusing on Flex Loans and other liquidity products via DeFi services to drive adoption amongst DeFi protocols

• Align all Olympus work groups around Olympus Flex Loans adoption
• Develop use cases and user journeys that integrates Olympus and partners (e.g. Bond Protocol)
• Establish a customer research process to inform product development and needs in the market, a partner funnel, and standardized protocol review framework

2. Increase utility from emissions Ensure that protocol emissions are used for maximum protocol benefit

• Evaluate gOHM vs vaults
• Framework for mint & sync to OHM pools (to attract third party LPs)
• Framework for mint & sync to Flex Loan partners that offset negative effects from Olympus monetary growth

3. R&D efforts to build products, features or services that drive utility and adoption

• Evaluate generalized lending market implementations
• Evaluate an Institutional OHM offload facility
• Identify potential markets that can be be OHM denominated (e.g. NFTs)

Stability (via monetary policy)

Increase autonomy and transparency of the monetary policy, aim for stable growth of monetary supply and reducing volatility

1. Launch Range Bound Stability v1

• Deploy v1 to test and evaluate parameters and demonstrate increased stability of OHM

2. Launch Internal (OHM) Bonds

• Define core design goal of internal bonds
• Tie into Emission Framework and define rollout implementation

3. R&D efforts to improve and simplify the monetary policy and protocol mechanics

• Evaluate Range Bound Stability with TWAMMs
• Evaluate simplified RBS

4. Align communication, protocol phase, and position - Olympus is in stable growth phase (after launch, before stability)

• Designate the main long term OHM token (OHM vs gOHM)
• Redefine protocol/user personas and core mechanics (3,3 9,9 etc)
• Emphasize positioning vs fiat currencies and core protocol values
• Provable autonomous monetary policy, provable reserves
• Transparent, decentralized, community governed
• Aim to reduce volatility while reducing market operations over time
• Develop the underlying OHM based economy in DeFi, e.g. LP with other assets
• Communicate that reserves and price are not 1:1. Move away from using the term backing
• Reduce market operations over time while maintaining relative stability

Stability (via transparency and trust)

Increase stability through clear governance and transparency

1. Launch on-chain governance

• Launch on-chain governance v1 and evaluate
• Propose delegation structure based on on-chain governance system
• Framework for community voting
• Framework for delegation to multisigs
• Evaluate delegation to DAO/sub-DAO
• Evaluate separation of Reserves and Strategic Assets

2. Evaluate protocol separation of backing assets and strategic assets

• Evaluate restructuring of protocol and DAO assets, DAO OHM reserve size and OHM minting to DAO
• Protocol - reserve assets and LP
• DAO - strategic assets, OHM reserve
• Evaluate using strategic assets to short term incentivise OHM adoption (e.g. incentivize Flex Loan usage), sustainably fund the DAO long term
• Evaluate gamification of strategic asset rewards
• Propose Reserve and Strategic assets framework
• Reserve assets managed by community vote
• Community vote to delegate strategic assets management to the DAO